Iconic denizens of the deep

By GREG DIXON

There's a peculiar look to these fish. Dangling on clear threads from the ceiling of Auckland's Milford Galleries, they appear fantastic, feisty and a little frightening as they swim in the bright, white light of a winter's evening.

One, a black, red and gold denizen of the deep titled O ie Sao Sao Lapo'a, is not the sort you'd want to meet while having a dip. All razor teeth, it looks like it might bite your leg off if you strayed too near.

Another, Ngai Tahu, seems to be a strange tuna genetically modified so that it bears what looks like a taniwha's head.

Venus' Sperm, a silver, red-striped and tail-less whale crossed with a spermatozoa, lies on the wooden floor with its four-lipped mouth wide open. It appears to have escaped the nylon fishing lines that have caught the others.

Michel Tuffery, an artist famous for his cows made from corned-beef cans, is all at sea with his latest work. Collectively titled Uma - a Samoan word meaning final, last or finish - the exhibition consists of these four large-scale sculptures (up to 2.5m in length). All very fishy they may be, yet they sit firmly in Tuffery's oeuvre.

Again using tin from food cans (herring this time, but also beef), this new work finds Tuffery once more exploring Pacific ways of life, its origins, migration, cultural beliefs and its hybridisation through globalisation and immigration.

These fish are also iconic, abstract and rather fun - from a distance.

What they aren't is political, Tuffery says, though he hopes they will stimulate debate. "I'm putting it out there for us as a nation to basically take the Pacific seriously because as far as New Zealand - and Australia - goes, we have a responsibility to these islands."

What that responsibility is remains rather vague as the words pour out of the undoubtedly passionate Tuffery.

If his art is striking and tangible, his conversation is less so as his mind and mouth madly race through the thoughts and ideas that drive his work.

It seems that Uma and the one-off multi-media performance for its opening last week are a meditation on the cultural and social changes in the Pacific since James Cook's 1768 voyage to Tahiti. Cook went there to set up a observatory for the Royal Society so the planet Venus might be better observed. The voyage led him down the Pacific along the Tongan Trench and included his claiming parts of New Zealand for the British Crown.

"So Venus is the sperm that came down from up north and tracked us down to Aotearoa, through the Society Islands," Tuffery says, with a hoot. "[Uma] is about how much we've changed as a race because of all the new blood that's come here.

"I think these performances are a chance for people to have a conversation about our society because we are unique as a society and that's what I'm embracing."

Using herring tins for these fish was deliberate (as is the corned-beef tin used for the bulls that he occasionally sets fire to during performances; one of which is planned for the end of this year, possibly for the America's Cup).

"It's a joke played on the fishing companies. They basically come and fish, take it and then sell it back to the locals. That doesn't work for me. That's why we've got a whole lot of disease problems, like diabetes."

Environment is also an important issue for the Wellington-raised Tuffery who, since completing a diploma in fine arts at Otago Polytechnic's School of Fine Arts in 1989, has received dozens of awards and commissions and has had his work included in public collections from Te Papa to Sydney to Frankfurt.

While pursuing his art full-time he has, for eight years or so, done teaching and environmental work throughout the Pacific for the United Nations and Unesco. It has taken him to the Solomons, Vanuatu, Tokelau, the Cook group and Samoa.

"I never went to teachers' college, I just learned what they wanted to know. That's where the environmental bit came in. I was [teaching] at school but I needed to pay more attention to what was happening in the markets, like the fish that was coming in, and looking at the rubbish that was coming on to the islands and how they got rid of the rubbish."

His use of tin riveted together (a process which has given him repetitive strain injury) also plays on ideas of commercialisation, cargo cults and the deforestation, water shortages and pollution which have resulted from farming cattle in the Islands.

"I went for the tin and metal thing because we're known for our carving. I thought I would do the opposite, play with metal, a medium we don't have to play with, something unusual."

As well, the food cans represent death - dead meat or fish in a can.

"The thing is that we don't take death seriously. We take it for granted. When we go to the supermarket, we roll in and throw the meat into the trolley. I had two guys from London to look after a couple of weeks ago and they were freaking out seeing these cows walking next to them and they were trying to dodge the poos, the patties. For us it's still natural."

* Michel Tuffery, Uma, Milford Galleries, until September 9.

* Michel Tuffery's brother Sheyne last week won the Martin Hughes Contemporary Pacific Art Award for his entry of three wood-prints depicting his trademark vision of urban buildings with fantasised Pacific-style roofs. The $2500 travel grant, from Martin Hughes Architecture and Interiors, will allow Tuffery to travel to New York and Samoa later in the year. While in Samoa, Tuffery intends to learn how to make a fale, and hopes to give slideshows and lectures at the University of South Pacific in Apia, "to give something back" to the culture which has contributed so much to his art.